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San Francisco's Urban Retreat

By TERRY TRUCCO

Published: October 15, 1995

IT was a typical late-summer day in San Francisco -- breezy, hazy and cold, though the sun was doing its best to burn off the fog. The city was packed with visitors, but you'd never know it from where my husband, Steve, and I sat on Baker Beach, an idyllic milelong stretch of sand near San Francisco's northwestern tip, with an inspiring view of the Pacific Ocean and the Golden Gate Bridge.

A guidebook I'd read warned that on weekends picnickers and sunbathers swarmed onto the beach, but on this Wednesday afternoon we had the place to ourselves, except for an old man with a fishing pole. Seated on a log at the water's edge, we gazed out at the ocean and the tawny hills of the Marin Headlands and took in deep breaths of sea air. From our sand dune in the wilds it was hard to believe this was part of bustling San Francisco.

The absence of crowds seemed doubly strange since we were also on the outskirts of the newest section of a national park, the 1,480-acre Presidio, the 218-year-old military base that became part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area on Oct. 1, 1994.

A glance at a map shows that the Presidio occupies a hefty piece of prime turf overlooking both the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay in the city's northwest corner. But unlike its tourist-saturated cousins such as Yosemite National Park or the Grand Canyon, the Presidio still seems pleasantly uncrowded. In the two and a half days I recently spent at the park, both with my husband and on my own, I never waited in a line, and was never asked to snap a photograph of a fellow traveler. Those were weekdays, of course, but even on weekends, when the lookout deck near the Golden Gate Bridge is jam-packed, parts of the park, a ranger assured me, are almost people free.

It is, in short, the ultimate urban retreat, a place to escape for an afternoon, drink in a little military history, snuggle up to mother nature and catch your breath before plunging back into the fray of the city.

This is a park of quiet pleasures -- exquisite walking trails lined with fragrant wildflowers, water views (both ocean and bay), superb 19th-century architecture and over 170 species of birds. The California quail and the hairy woodpecker both inhabit the park. The few people I saw looked like local residents, from the runners pounding the bayside trail near Crissy Airfield, to the cyclists pedaling through the Presidio's rugged forests of eucalyptus, cypress and pine. (The Presidio was a nonrestricted base long before the military left, so San Franciscans are familiar with its hiking and biking trails.)

The Presidio's moderate head count stems in part from its status as a park-in-progress. After its long history as a military base, first under Spain, which founded it in 1776, then under Mexico, which occupied it from 1821, and, finally, the United States, which seized it during the Mexican-American war in 1846, Congress passed legislation in 1972 calling for the Presidio's transfer from the Department of Defense to the National Park Service. The move became a reality in 1989, when Congress voted to close the base as a cost-cutting measure and hand it over to the Park Service in 1994.

Despite an amicable transfer, the Presidio has lost much of its spit-and-polish appearance, as well as its sense of purpose, since the military departed. Parts of the old base look like a ghost town, with dozens of deserted buildings, including some magnificent Queen Anne-style Victorian houses. You see broken windows and dried-up lawns riddled with weeds. Vast sections of the enormous grounds also look neglected, including sections of forest that soldiers planted from seedlings a century ago to halt erosion and provide windbreaks.

IN fact, there's so much infrastructure work required, from the removal of toxic substances in confined areas to reviewing the seismic codes for several hundred buildings, that the Park Service seems overwhelmed. A ranger admitted that no one is shooing out the Sixth U.S. Army's remaining personnel, since they keep their houses painted and maintain their yards.

The Park Service hasn't yet made the Presidio as visitor friendly as it could be, either. There's an information center about a mile in from the Lombard Street entrance at the eastern edge of the park. But with no mention of the center as you enter the park -- the faded map near the Lombard Street entrance tells you where to pick up a military ID and find the Officers' Club -- Steve and I drove aimlessly before finding a free, up-to-date map at the post office, which turned out to be a short drive from the information center.

The Presidio's future is, in fact, somewhat hazy. According to the Park Service's latest grandiose-sounding proposal, the 21st-century Presidio will be a center for conservation and environmental management, with many buildings leased for research, education and training institutions "addressing the world's most critical environmental, social and cultural issues." The Gorbachev Foundation, set up by the former Soviet President, already leases the 1890 Coast Guard lifesaving station for a think tank with a peace theme, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is next door, though the plan also calls for more mundane elements, like bed and breakfast inns and improved hiking trails.